Community

Our Approach

With 541 stores in the United Kingdom and Ireland, we offer support to a wide range of charities and organisations of all sizes, by working to provide them with donations that are of most benefit to them and their particular cause, whether it be a financial donation, or the offer of products that can be used to realise additional funding. Our aim is to make a difference, so we do not support a single 'Charity of the Year', as we believe we are able to make a greater impact by working with a wider group of charities and organisations. In addition to supporting individual charity requests, we also agree to support some charities for an agreed number of years with a specified donation. This commitment helps the charities to be able to plan their work with confidence.

Our priorities are to:

Offer support to charities and organisations of all sizes with a donation that is of most benefit to them

Focus our resources on charitable projects that support benefit communities across the UK and Ireland

Work to identify and develop new relationships with charities and organisations

To ensure we can measure and monitor our overall community investment, we calculate the value of our non-financial contributions gained from products donated from within the business. This figure is added to our financial contributions, to arrive at the total sum contributed for the year.

Our charity and sponsorship programme is made up of donations to:

Registered charities - we have offered support to over 350 charities of all sizes during 2013 who have asked for contributions to support their work in the areas of children, care for the sick and people with disabilities, healthcare and medical research and community support.

Individual requests/ local and national groups and organisations - we are able to help groups and organisations who do not have charitable status through these donations.

Commercial support and sponsorship - we offer commercial support and sponsorship to a small number of organisations. We also support local sporting teams of all ages, especially where there is direct employee involvement with the team.

Our Challenges and Targets

Work with charitable organisations to identify value they are able to realise from products NEXT can no longer use. This initiative supports both our community focus and our environment targets of waste reduction and landfill diversion